It’s taken about a month to finally find the time to write about my 7 day challenge but better late than never!
It was a wonderfully productive, educational, exciting week, during which I learned a lot about little and not so little things I can do (well everyone of us can) to make our planet a bit better and hopefully extend it’s life span.
I won’t list everything I did (you can have a look at a selection of photos below and my Instagram posts on each day about it) but the biggest lesson I’ve learnt is, as cheesy as it sounds, that every little helps.
Reducing the use of plastic and cars as much as possible, reducing water, electricity and meat consumption, recycling, picking up litter, we can all do them to a lesser or greater degree. I promise you, it’s not as hard as you think it might be.
I personally found it much easier than I thought not to eat meat for a week and I love the reusable glass straws I bought to replace the paper ones, they have a better feel and no need to throw anything away! One of the people on the group commuted to work by bus which wasn’t as inconvenient as he initialy thought it would be, another installed a water filter to avoid buying plastic bottles, some discovered eco-friendly cosmetics, whereas others now take their water bottle and reuseable straws with them everywhere they go and the list goes on. Check out the Embassy of Sweden in Cyprus Facebook page, where you can read more about the group’s challenges
We can’t be using the excuse of ‘Unless the industry/government/etc does something about it, there’s no point of me trying’ anymore. If we all adopt more sustainable habits, we can not only help save the planet and live a healthier life, but we can also inspire others and all these small changes will add up and create a huge impact.
We have now truly ran out of time. We need to act now and restore as much damage we made to our beautiful planet as possible.
What this 7-day challenge proved to myself and the rest of the group is that living a more sustainable life is certainly possible and the way forward is not by adopting habits that would make our everyday life impossible and we eventually cease doing them, but by making a lot of smaller, easier to adopt changes.
Lessons I learned after I turned 30 